8 Awesome Advances in Medical Technology

Sometimes I think we live in the future. The advances we’ve seen in medical technology just in the last year are staggering, mind-boggling; they’re things you’d only ever expect to see in a science fiction film, not a modern hospital.

Nexagon Healing Gel

Nexagon is a healing gel straight out of The Empire Strikes Back. Remember that scene where Luke’s been rescued from the freezing cold of Hoth after being attacked by the Wampa snow monster? They had him floating in a tank of what they call Bacta gel. (Yeah, I’m a bit of a Star Wars geek. I don’t even have to look this stuff up.)

Nexagon is exactly like that, only you don’t have to have a whole tank of it. They can apply it topically. How cool is that?

Nexagon Makes Wounds History

Berkeley Bionics’ eLEGS

Berkeley Bionics’ eLEGS are an outgrowth of military technology that allow seriously disabled people to stand and walk again. They’re no giant mecha – but the gift they give these people is infinitely more valuable – the ability to stand and look others in the eye with dignity for the first time in years.

eLEGS Helps People Walk Away From Their Wheelchairs

Skin Bio-Printer

Who’d have thought that dot matrix printing technology could be so versatile, or so important in the 21st century? That’s the essential basis for many current innovations in technology from 3D printing to this, a proposal that would see the technology adapted to print a solution of living skin cells directly onto wounds, eliminating the need for skin grafts and greatly accelerating the healing process.

Skin Bioprinter Prints New Skin Directly on the Body

iPhone Blood Pressure Monitor

There truly is an app for everything these days. Now you can use your iPhone to check your blood pressure, of all things. This is a huge boon to medicine as it makes it realistic to track your blood pressure far more regularly, which gives doctors better information with which to diagnose conditions. Still, one has to wonder what’s next; Open Heart Surgery for iPhone 7? Who knows at this rate!

GeekBeat.TV #85 CES 2011 – iOS Blood Pressure Monitor

Withings Health Dashboard

It’s easy to ignore what a scale has to say when it’s hidden away in the bathroom and nobody can see what it says but you. That’s the theory behind Twitter scales that auto-tweet your weight; it’s the theory behind the Withings Health Dashboard as well, which broadcasts your information in glorious HD to your living room TV, for the delight (or horror) of family and friends. It’s all about accountability. Is that doughnut really worth the extra whispering and finger-pointing?

Now Your TV Knows You’re Fat, Too

PixelOptics Electronic Bi-Focal Eyeglasses

Traditional bifocal eyeglasses are useful but far from perfect since they divide the usable portion of your field of vision up into sections. Wouldn’t it be great if that reduction of the usable field of view weren’t necessary? If you could just hit a switch and change the whole lens into the mode you require?

That’s exactly what the genius minds at PixelOptics were thinking when they created their electronic glasses. Hit a button on the frames, or even just look up or down, and the glasses switch from reading to distance viewing automatically, by the magic of liquid crystal optics embedded inside the lens glass.

PixelOptics Electronic Eyeglasses

Skin Cell Gun

The Skin Cell gun is very similar in concept to the Skin Bio-Printer. The idea is to create a mixture of the patients’ own skin stem cells and spray them onto a severe burn wound. The Skin Cell Gun can heal second degree burns completely, and within only a few days. This is great news for burn victims, who are left horribly vulnerable without the skin’s protection if left unhealed too long.

Skin Gun – Futuristic Burn Treatment

Artificial e-Skin

I’ve talked a lot about skin in this post, and we’re not done yet! Science has even devised completely artificial skin, dubbed e-Skin. This won’t be of much use to burn victims though; no, this is one technological advance that is aimed at our future robot overlords.

Perhaps they won’t become our overlords, though. The goal of e-Skin is to enable robots to feel, after all. Maybe if the robots are more sensitive, they won’t feel so inclined to enslave us. We can hope, right?

Artificial e-Skin Offers Hope to Unfeeling Robots Everywhere